Dream Man by Linda Howard

that she managed to get to before someone else did. Then she sat in the car for several minutes, taking deep breaths and trying to achieve some sense of calm. She stared at the bank building, finding comfort in its solidity. Her job was such a nice, safe, passionless one, in accounting. She had chosen it deliberately, when she had moved here. Numbers didn’t bombard her with thoughts and feelings, didn’t ask for anything from her. Their qualities never varied; a zero was always a zero. All she had to do was align them into columns, feed them into a computer, keep track of their credits and debits. Numbers were always neat, never messy like human beings were.
    And it felt good to support herself, even though she knew she didn’t have to. The small house she had made into a home had been bought outright for her, when she had decided that she wanted to live in Florida, on the opposite end of the country from Washington. Dr. Ewell would have arranged for her to receive a check each month, had she wanted; she hadn’t, preferring to finally stand alone, with-out all the support systems of the Association. Even now, all she had to do was pick up the telephone and tell Dr. Ewell that she needed help, and it would be provided. Though it hadn’t been his fault, hadn’t been anyone’s fault, Dr. Ewell was still dealing with his guilt over what had happened six years ago. She sighed. She was paid by the hour, every minute she sat there was being deducted from her paycheck. Resolutely she pushed Detective Hollister out of her mind and got out of the car.
    “Hey, doll, found anything interesting yet?” Detective Fredericka Brown, who answered only to
    “Freddie,” patted Dane on the head as she passed behind his chair. She was a tall, lanky, endearingly plain woman, with a habitually cheerful and amused expression that invited smiles. It was tough for a woman to be a cop in general, and a detective in particular, but Freddie had fit right in. She was blissfully married to a high school football coach, size huge, who looked as if he would tear limb from limb anyone who caused his Freddie the least upset. Freddie tended to treat all of the other detectives as if they were the teenage boys on her husband’s team, with a disconcerting blend of light flirtation and motherliness. Dane scowled at her. “This should have been your case. We had the weekend off, damn it.”
    “Sorry,” she said blithely, giving Trammell a smile of greeting when he looked up from the telephone that had been welded to his ear for most of the morning.
    “How’s the tooth?” Dane asked.
    “Better. I’m up to my eyeteeth in antibiotics and painkill-ers, no pun intended. It was an abscess, so now I’m having a root canal.”
    “Tough.” The sympathy was sincere.
    “I’ll live, but Worley’s doing all the driving while I have to take this stuff.” Worley was her partner.
    “Anything we can do to help, any leads we can run down? We have our own cases, but from what I’ve heard, the scene Saturday morning was straight out of a horror movie.”
    “It wasn’t pretty.” An understatement if he’d ever made one. Freddie patted him again, this time on the shoulder, and went about her business. Dane turned back to his.
    Detective work was mostly boring; it involved a lot of talking on the telephone, going through papers, or going out to talk to people face-to-face. Dane had spent the last few hours involved in the first two activities. Usually Trammell handled this part of the job better than he did, being more patient, but this time he had set himself to it with grim determination. What had happened to Nadine Vinick should never happen to anyone, but it really pissed him off that Marlie Keen had all but rubbed his nose in her knowledge of it.
    “Got anything yet?” Trammell asked, frustration plain in his voice as he hung up the telephone. “I came up empty on both the pizza delivery and the cable company. The entire street had trouble with the